In a general way, I understand what you are saying about consumerism. If I read you correctly, you want everyone to consume less and become more frugal. To essentially decrease our negative impact on the planet. But what is extravagance is going to vary largely depending on the individual. See, I know you like sailing around and visiting places in your boat. For me, since I don't care for sailing, I would consider such a thing an extravagance and waste. My daughter buys high end computer gaming rigs and loves competing in multiplayer games. She is otherwise frugal in other aspects of her life and has no debt. I like high end guns and its a passion with me.

Now it appears to me that government could enforce frugality by creating massive consumption taxes. But on who and what goods and services should be taxed out of existence? You see the problem we are getting into here? Or we could make the cost of debt so high through raising interest rates so high the majority could not finance most things in life and be forced to pay as you go. As you can imagine, either approaches will result in destruction of entire industries that depend on consumption and a lot of it.

My thought is the best you can do is to educate your kids to embrace the minimalist lifestyle and hope it catches on. But kids won't embrace it, if they don't see you doing it yourself and most parents don't or won't. People like nice things and feel those things make them happy. Even though we know that they really don't.

The last thing that will enforce frugality will be hard times. The Great Depression created frugal people because they had no choice but to be frugal. At least until the bad times went away, then consumption increased even among that generation.

When we reach hard resource limits, like peak oil, the decision whether to adopt frugality won't be a choice, it will be a forced reality. I do think this is the only workable approach without government intervention or a sudden awakening that this is coming for us.

Cog wrote:When we reach hard resource limits, like peak oil, the decision whether to adopt frugality won't be a choice, it will be a forced reality. I do think this is the only workable approach without government intervention or a sudden awakening that this is coming for us.

During the depression it wasn't resource limits that forced the frugality but rather financial collapse. Economic cycle rebounded and yes folks went back to consumption. Worth mentioning that there were a lot less folks back then as well.

Ecological overshoot of which peak oil is just one of many consequences results in a very different dynamic. There is no cyclical rebound really but rather the long slow decline or fast decline. Stability and security become paramount in this scenario since the economic engine will not function to allow industries to rebound. This will force increased regulation to manage this decline and actually I have always predicted that this will not be so much the heavy hand of the government but actually come from the desire of the citizens themselves.

Consumption retreats to the basics and of course within this constrained environment there will still be market forces and still be incentives to reward individuals but in order for the society at large to remain stable there is no way to avoid increase regulation.

Look at it this way. For the past several generations individual liberty was played out on a chess board that was stable and fixed. The individuals could move around not being undermined by the board shifting.

Ecological overshoot results in trying to continue to play the game of individual pursuit of freedom while the chess board is shaking and rocking back and forth. The role of government then becomes to keep the chess board as stable and secure as possible so that you and me can continue to pursue our freedoms and liberties. To keep that chess board stable we will submit, wish and support increased government regulation.

Not any of us really since we are children of a generation that were raised with a stable chess board under our feet. The last thing any of us want is to have government regulate our freedoms. We are children of an abundant age.

I am referring to the generations that will follow who will embrace increased government regulation to keep the chess board stable so they can continue to play the game.

Most people are not really cognizant of what a game changer it will be when ecological overshoot results in constraints that last for generations on a global population approaching 10 billion humans.

What is funny is that we are all debating from positions of obsolescence.

How does it really feel to be irrelevant? Get used to it.

Our resiliency resembles an invasive weed. We are the Kudzu Apeblog: http://blog.mounttotumas.com/website: http://www.mounttotumas.com

One thing I will add to the above. Frugality before we have achieved population stability is a bad thing. It will conserve resources which others will consume to increase the numbers of humans that already overcrowd the Earth. Thirty billion frugal people will replace ten billion wasteful consumers. Then when we hit the same resource limits, three times as many humans will then suffer and die.

It is tragedy writ large. Those who achieve population stability are overwhelmed by refugees from places that have not. We need to build a wall, and eventually as conditions worsen, we will be forced to enforce the border,, raining death from drones above, against those who merely want a fair share of what we have.

Nobody understands this as much as those who are here illegally already. The strongest anti-illegal rhetoric I ever heard was expressed by a group of Hondurans I hired recently to do landscaping and to build a deck at my former California home. They all owned diesel pickup trucks they were making payments on, and all wanted cash and claimed to not have SSNs. Who really knows? I could not even ask for proof of legal status because all the legitimate contractors had already declined my small job.

Now here in Wisconsin, my kids In-laws who are still farming or contracting are reluctantly employing Hispanics who are of questionable status, and speak Portuguese and Spanish. Meanwhile their own kids are going to college or finding employment outside the family business. It is the same as California 20 to 30 years ago. Such things surprise me, I grew up in the MidWest one state South of this one.

Where California leads, the USA follows. Chicago with it's bone-chilling murder rate is already a "sanctuary'. I won't go there, it's no longer a safe place.

Edit: Ibon, we were responding to the same post by Cog with what turned out to be similar thoughts.

My thought is the best you can do is to educate your kids to embrace the minimalist lifestyle and hope it catches on. But kids won't embrace it, if they don't see you doing it yourself and most parents don't or won't. People like nice things and feel those things make them happy. Even though we know that they really don't.

The last thing that will enforce frugality will be hard times. The Great Depression created frugal people because they had no choice but to be frugal. At least until the bad times went away, then consumption increased even among that generation.

My parents generation were not consumers, my generation are. Thus attitudes can be changed. Unfortunately our (governmental/religious/social) leaders are not attuned to our new circumstances.

New leadership may arise, we see glimmers if it here and there. Take for instance “The Matrix”, it has at its core the concept that we are being controlled by elites and its honorable to break free.

The germs of change exist, I just ask that we nourish them, we don’t allow ourselves to get caught in our -isims, we nourish frugality as a virtue. If it catches or not is beyond our control, all we can do is to not stand in its way.

There is no doubt that over population, if not the cause, is the major prolonged effect of our recent caloric splurge. We in our home countries can do nothing to reduce worldwide over population. We CAN do things within our own countries. I heard Tucker Carlson ask (heavily paraphrased) “How many people do we want in America? If we add new folks, who should they be”. I think Trump tweeted “The country is full.” Those are good questions, and I think a lot of Americans (Brits/Germans/Japanese) are asking similar questions. I’ll add one more, why are we worried about finding menial job workers AND worried about AI displacing workers? Cognative dissonance?

Newfie wrote:The germs of change exist, I just ask that we nourish them, we don’t allow ourselves to get caught in our -isims, we nourish frugality as a virtue. If it catches or not is beyond our control, all we can do is to not stand in its way.

If you look at our agrarian past, particularly in the higher latitudes of long cold winters, frugality was in the bones of every one. No one assumed guaranteed abundance, uncertainty dictated frugality, long winters living off of stored harvests.

A note from down under here in developing countries. Almost all of my construction staff, all of our farm hands, whether indigenous or latino, none of them save money, live frugally or bank for hard times. Almost every single staff members have zero balance at the end of the month. Bonuses and windfalls are a reason to party, to buy a new fancy cellphone or to get shitfaced for a couple of weeks and then go back to work. Panamanians rate very very high on the happiness scale.

Interesting because well being is high and frugality is low......

There is side of frugality where you become defensive, scrooge like, intolerant, ungenerous, suspicious, like a mouse in a hole guarding your possessions with possessive desperation.

It is possible to take this frugality theme too far and become antisocial and misanthropic.

There are those who can give up consumerism but dance free with a heart full of generosity, especially if they are moving about a world of frightened myopic defensive frugal misers!

Just to keep things clear!

Our resiliency resembles an invasive weed. We are the Kudzu Apeblog: http://blog.mounttotumas.com/website: http://www.mounttotumas.com

My only thoughts at this juncture is that happiness is not directly related to your status as a consumer/non-consumer, or whether one practices frugality or not, nor does the tendancy to be a scrooge even directly relate to frugality.

As they say, happiness comes from within. As long as you have the basic necessities of life, you can relax and be happy, or furiously work and be happy, or wander the Earth and be happy. It is completely up to you, and to nobody else. I have known people who were happiest when they were complaining about the hand that fate dealt them in life, and I learned to leave them be.

See you are catching the spirit. Above some modest level of income money does not make us happy.

Buy a bunch of stuff you don’t need and especially running deep into debt to do it can make one decidedly miserable.

Ending climate change does not require ending Capitalisim, it does require a definite change in our attitude about how to acquire happiness. It requires adopting something alone the lines of “simple living” or “voluntary simplicity.” There is a current small house movement that is popular.

Simple living encompasses a number of different voluntary practices to simplify one's lifestyle. These may include, for example, reducing one's possessions, generally referred to as minimalism, or increasing self-sufficiency. Simple living may be characterized by individuals being satisfied with what they have rather than want.[1][2] Although asceticism generally promotes living simply and refraining from luxury and indulgence, not all proponents of simple living are ascetics.[3] Simple living is distinct from those living in forced poverty, as it is a voluntary lifestyle choice.

Adherents may choose simple living for a variety of personal reasons, such as spirituality, health, increase in quality time for family and friends, work–life balance, personal taste, financial sustainability, frugality, or reducing stress. Simple living can also be a reaction to materialism and conspicuous consumption. Some cite socio-political goals aligned with the environmentalist, anti-consumerist or anti-war movements, including conservation, degrowth, social justice, and tax resistance.[4

Newfie wrote:I keep harping on the difference between Consumerisim and Capitalisim because it is crucial to understanding our path forward..

I think this distinction you have been drawing is important actually. The pressures of constraining resources may result in a decoupling of sorts between the culture of consumption and the basic bones of the economic system of capitalism. ?? Yeah, I can imagine....

Thanks for that. I know I’m pitching a hard sell but I’m convienced I’m into something. It does require taking a different world view.

...our present system of money-with-interest generates the necessity for endless growth, how it embodies linear thinking, how it defies the cyclical patterns of nature, and how it drives the relentless conversion of all forms of wealth into money. As well, interest is the wellspring of our economy's ever-intensifying competition, systemic scarcity, and concentration of wealth. Yet more than an accidental artifact of history, interest is tied in to our self-conception as separate, competing subjects seeking to gather more and more of the world within the boundaries of "mine". The change in our fundamental ontology expressed in part by the new sciences will also, therefore, ultimately generate a new system of money consistent with a different conception of self and world.

A society's system of money is inseparable from other aspects of its relationship to the world and the relationships among its members. Money as we know it today both reflects and propels the objectification of the world, the paradigm of competition, and the depersonalization and atomization of society. We should therefore expect that any authentic change in these conditions would necessarily also involve a change in our system of money.

As a matter of fact, there are money systems that encourage sharing not competition, conservation not consumption, and community, not anonymity. Pilot versions of such systems have been around for at least a hundred years now, but because they are inimical to the larger patterns of our culture, they have been marginalized or even actively suppressed. Meanwhile, many creative proposals for new modes of industry such as Paul Hawken's Ecology of Commerce, and many green design technologies, are uneconomic under the current money system. The alternative money systems I describe below will naturally induce the economies described by visionaries such as Hawken, E.F. Schumacher, Herman Daly, and others. They will also reverse the progressive nationalization and globalization of every economic sector, revitalize communities, and contribute to the elimination of the "externalities" that put economic growth at odds with human happiness and planetary health.

Given the determining role of interest, the first alternative currency system to consider is one that structurally eliminates it. As the history of the Catholic Church demonstrates, laws and admonitions against interest are ineffective if its structural necessity is still present in the nature of the currency. A structural solution is needed, such as the system proposed by Silvio Gesell in The Natural Economic Order. Gesell's "free-money" (as he called it) bears a form of negative interest called demurrage. Periodically, a stamp costing a tiny fraction of the currency's denomination must be affixed to it, in effect a "user fee" or a "maintenance cost"; another way to look at it is that the currency "goes bad"—depreciates in value—as it ages.[3]

If this sounds like a radical proposal that could never work, it may surprise you to learn that no less an authority than John Maynard Keynes praised the theoretical soundness of Gesell's ideas. What's more, the system has actually been tried out with great success.

Although demurrage was applied as long ago as Ancient Egypt in the form of a storage cost for commodity-backed currency,[4] the best-known example was instituted in the town of Worgl, Austria, in 1932 by its famous mayor Uttenguggenberger. To remain valid, each piece of this locally-issued currency required a monthly stamp costing 1% of its face value. Instead of generating interest and growing, accumulation of wealth became a burden—much like possessions are a burden to the nomadic hunter-gatherer. People therefore spent their income quickly, generating intense economic activity in the town. The unemployment rate plummeted even as the rest of the country slipped into a deepening depression; public works were completed, and prosperity continued until the Worgl currency was outlawed in 1933 at the behest of a threatened central bank.

Demurrage produces a number of profound economic, social, and psychological effects. Conceptually, demurrage works by freeing material goods, which are subject to natural cyclic processes of renewal and decay, from their linkage with a money that only grows, exponentially, over time. As established in Chapter Four, this dynamic is what is driving us toward ruin in the utter exhaustion of all social, cultural, natural, and spiritual wealth. Demurrage currency merely subjects money to the same laws as natural commodities, whose continuing value requires maintenance. Gesell writes:

Gold does not harmonise with the character of our goods. Gold and straw, gold and petrol, gold and guano, gold and bricks, gold and iron, gold and hides! Only a wild fancy, a monstrous hallucination, only the doctrine of "value" can bridge the gulf. Commodities in general, straw, petrol, guano and the rest can be safely exchanged only when everyone is indifferent as to whether he possesses money or goods, and that is possible only if money is afflicted with all the defects inherent in our products. That is obvious. Our goods rot, decay, break, rust, so only if money has equally disagreeable, loss-involving properties can it effect exchange rapidly, securely and cheaply. For such money can never, on any account, be preferred by anyone to goods. Only money that goes out of date like a newspaper, rots like potatoes, rusts like iron, evaporates like ether, is capable of standing the test as an instrument for the exchange of potatoes, newspapers, iron and ether. For such money is not preferred to goods either by the purchaser or the seller. We then part with our goods for money only because we need the money as a means of exchange, not because we expect an advantage from possession of the money. In other words, money as a medium of exchange is decoupled from money as a store of value. No longer is money an exception to the universal tendency in nature toward rust, mold, rot and decay—that is, toward the recycling of resources. No longer does money perpetuate a human realm separate from nature.

Gesell's phrase, "... a monstrous hallucination, the doctrine of 'value'..." hints at an even more subtle and more potent effect of demurrage. What is he talking about? Value is the doctrine that assigns to each object in the world a number. It associates an abstraction, changeless and independent, with that which always changes and that exists in relationship to all else. Demurrage reverses this thinking and thus removes an important boundary between the human realm and the natural realm. When money is no longer preferred to goods, we will lose the habit of thinking in terms of how much something is "worth".

Whereas interest promotes the discounting of future cash flows, demurrage encourages long-term thinking. In present-day accounting, a rain forest generating one million dollars a year sustainably forever is more valuable if clearcut for an immediate profit of 50 million dollars. (In fact, the net present value of the sustainable forest calculated at a discount rate of a mere 5% is only $20 million.) This discounting of the future results in the infamously short-sighted behavior of corporations that sacrifice (even their own) long-term well-being for the short-term results of the fiscal quarter. Such behavior is perfectly rational in an interest-based economy, but in a demurrage system, pure self-interest would dictate that the forest be preserved. No longer would greed motivate the robbing of the future for the benefit of the present. As the exponential discounting of future cash flows implies the "cashing in" of the entire earth, as illustrated in Chapter Four, this feature of demurrage is highly attractive.

Whereas interest tends to concentrate wealth, demurrage promotes its distribution. In any economy with a specialization of labor beyond the family level, human beings need to perform exchanges in order to survive. Both interest and demurrage represent a fee for the use of money, but the key difference is that in the former system, the fee accrues to those who already have money, while in the latter system it is levied upon those who have money. Wealth comes with a high maintenance cost, thereby recreating the dynamics that governed hunter-gatherer attitudes toward accumulations of possessions.

Whereas security in an interest-based system comes from accumulating money, in a demurrage system it comes from having productive channels through which to direct it—that is, to become a nexus of the flow of wealth and not a point for its accumulation. In other words, it puts the focus on relationships, not on "having". Metaphorically, then, and perhaps more than metaphorically, the demurrage system accords with a different sense of self, affirmed not by defining more and more of the world within the confines of me and mine, but by developing and deepening relationships with others. In other words, it encourages reciprocation, sharing, and the rapid circulation of wealth. It is conceivable that wealth in a demurrage system would evolve into something akin to the model of the Pacific Northwest or Melanesia, in which a leader "acts as a shunting station for goods flowing reciprocally between his own and other like groups of society."[5] These "big man" societies were not fully egalitarian and bore some degree of centricity, as perhaps is necessary in any economy with more than a very basic division of labor; the key point is that leadership was not associated with the accumulation of money or possessions, but rather with a huge responsibility for generosity. Can you imagine a society where the greatest prestige, power, and leadership accorded to those with the greatest inclination and capacity for generosity?

Others of us also studied Economics. However all of the historical writings on the topic suffer from the same problems. They were created entirely before the true nature of man the primate was understood. For someone who has been a member since 2005 you display an abysmal ignorance of the last half dozen years around here.

This knowledge came about entirely in the last four decades. Anthropology grew from the work of Darwin who was a contemporary of Karl Marx. Marx and Engels were the priviledged sons of upper Middle Class parents which allowed them both the education and the liesure time to create their entirely flawed theories. Anthropology grew fron Darwin's writings in a steady linear fashion, and by the second half of the 20th Century had obsoleted a great deal of economic theory, the so-called "behavioral sciences", and much of the conventional interpretations of History.

You see, there is nothing whatsoever aside from that set of instinctive primate behaviors that are popularly described as "Capitalism". In the 20th century, basic forms of every aspect of these behaviors were recognized by Anthropologists observing troups of bonobos, chimps, baboons, and gorillas. Capitalism was fully developed by the time the Silk Road was first in use, although the vocabulary needed to describe it properly would not exist for centuries.

Mankind may be the only ape with words, and a written language. However, any of the classic writings on economic theory which have not been torn apart and re-interpreted in the cold light of the new knowledge from primate studies are entirely defective. Everything that humans do arises from the same set of primate instincts, honed by evolution, that underly the behaviors of all apes.

One of our members here dubbed humans "Kudzu Apes". You would be best advised to search on that term (which we have used for a few years) before attempting to dazzle us with BS. Because we have indeed heard everything you think you know before, and have rejected a major portion of it, after prolonged debate.

You are welcome to participate in the debates here. Just do not expect us to either complete your education or to honor the common and widely accepted economic theories.

The only thing I will NOT dispute is that anybody who is so arrogant as to claim superior knowledge of a particular topic is abysmally ignorant, and furthermore unaware of it. If you know enough to be humbled by your own ignorance, you have taken the first step.

The arrogance/ignorance of the "soft" sciences, the LAS majors of all types, and the "social" sciences in fact surpass all others. Mankind is now an odd hybrid organism, part primate and part networked hive mind. Yet this fundamental change in the human mind and the sudden order of magnitude expansion of human knowledge that has resulted is either unnoticed or denied by most, as evidenced by the fact that they want to treat the rest of us as if we were still undergraduates.

Enough said. Everyone is welcome, but respect is earned by practicing courteous and respectful debate.

The only thing I will NOT dispute is that anybody who is so arrogant as to claim superior knowledge of a particular topic is abysmally ignorant, and furthermore unaware of it. If you know enough to be humbled by your own ignorance, you have taken the first step

While his presentation was not exactly out of Dale Carnegie there is something to his ideas. I’ve only a moment so far to gloss the post but I for one am very undivided about the concept of interest and how it will play out in humanities future. On the one hand it seems fundamental to our selfs, on the other it does seem to feed the cycle of never ending growth.

There may or may not be something to take away from that post. I reserve my judgement until I can more fully absorb it. Might take a while.

KJ's referring to propaganda science which is natural in a culture built on lies and deception. Science and history based on reality isn't taught in most schools.

Paradoxically, the same principles of mechanism, reductionism, and determinism that promise certainty and control also afflict us with feelings of powerlessness and bewilderment. For when we include ourselves among the Newtonian masses of the universe, then we too are at the mercy of blind, impersonal forces that wholly determine our life's trajectory. In the ideology we inherited from the Scientific Revolution, free will, like all the other secondary qualities, is a mere construct, a statistical approximation, but not fundamentally real.

To recover meaning, sacredness, or free will apparently requires dualism, a separation of self out from the deterministic laws of the universe—an ultimately incoherent solution which alienates us all the more. Yet the alternative is even worse: nihilism, the Existentialist void—philosophies which, not accidentally, emerged at the peak of the Newtonian World-machine's reign in the early 20th century. This worldview so deeply imbues our intuitions and logic that we can barely conceive of a self that is neither dualistically distinct from matter, nor a deterministic automaton whose attributes of mind or soul are mere epiphenomena. Prior to the 20th century, these were the only alternatives science presented us, a bleak choice that remains with us today like a burr in the shoe and will continue to generate existential unease until the day comes when we finally digest the ramifications of 20th century science.

This choice reflects an apparent incompatibility of science and religion. Intuitively rejecting the "deterministic automaton" of science, evangelical friends of mine choose instead to disbelieve vast swaths of science—all the physics, biology, archeology, paleontology, geology, and astronomy that conflicts with the Biblical story of creation. Meanwhile, scientifically-oriented people occupy the equally unenviable position of denying their intuitions of a purpose, significance, and destiny to life. I often detect a wistfulness in self-described atheists, as if they wished there were soul, God, purpose and significance—Wouldn't it be nice!—but that unfortunately, sober reason dictates otherwise. Sometimes they cover up this wistfulness or sense of loss with an aggressive display of self-righteousness along the lines of "I can handle the merciless truth, but you need to comfort yourself with fairy stories." Others are aggressively cynical and reflexively derisive. The emotions, anger and sadness, that underly these responses arise from the monstrous robbery I describe above. Again, this robbery is not the removal of God from Heaven—it is the removal of divinity from the world. Whether God has been removed to Heaven, as by religion, or extirpated altogether, as by science, matters little.

"Meanwhile, scientifically-oriented people occupy the equally unenviable position of denying their intuitions of a purpose, significance, and destiny to life"Science is an instrument that helps us understand the world. But, ultimately as free willed organisms we must confront the morality of what we do or not do. In that science cannot help us. For that we must find it in Religion or some other Code of Ethics

Philosophy and science used to be channeled through the conduit of peer review by learned individuals who had to pass the rigor of classical education and higher education. With Kj's glorious hybrid new human the voices of truly learned individuals are now drowned out in a sea of billions of mediocre "experts"

The hive mind is dumbed down to a degenerate super organism. This is not human cultural evolution.

It is decadence.

All we have done is given the stupidity of the masses a voice and have elevated it through the internet so that learned science and philosophy no longer is relevant and can not compete with the mediocrity that has replaced it.

Our resiliency resembles an invasive weed. We are the Kudzu Apeblog: http://blog.mounttotumas.com/website: http://www.mounttotumas.com